To facilitate the search for a parking space, services are known in which the driver transfers his/her vehicle to an operator of a parking facility, and this operator thereafter assumes the parking of the vehicle. When the vehicle is needed by its owner or by its driver again, the operator of the parking facility pulls the vehicle out of the parking space and makes it available for pick-up in a pick-up area. This service is also referred to as valet parking.
Previously, this service was usually implemented in that, upon arrival, the driver transfers his/her key to an employee of the parking facility operator. Pulling the vehicle into and out of the parking space is then carried out by the employee, who drives the vehicle from the transfer zone to the parking space and back to a pick-up area.
Furthermore, a method for the autonomous moving of a vehicle on a parking area is known from DE 10 2012 015 968 A1, for example. The vehicles are equipped with assistance systems, which allow autonomous driving. It is provided to enable an external control unit to access the vehicle in order to steer the vehicle to or from an assigned parking space of the parking area.
One challenge in connection with the fully automated parking is the navigation in the parking facility or in the parking garage. This is due to the fact, among other things, that generally there are no sufficient vehicle passageway markings or sufficient markings of the respective lanes in parking facilities, and, often in parking garages, particularly underground parking garages, no satellite navigation is available, and frequently no precise maps are available for navigation. Furthermore, it must be precisely detected which parking space in the parking facility is still free or already occupied, and in the parking garage, the height or the parking deck must be known or establishable by the vehicle, in addition to a position in the plane.
An RFID-based method, with the aid of which the occupancy of a parking space is detectable, is known from US 2012/0092189 A1. For this purpose, every parking space has an RFID tag. When a parking space is occupied by a vehicle, the signal of the RFID tag is blocked, so that a reading device, in response to an inquiry, is only able to receive responses from the RFID tags which are assigned to unoccupied parking spaces.
A method for determining a position of a vehicle on a vehicle passageway is known from US 2002/0143465 A1. For this purpose, magnets are embedded in the vehicle passageway, the lane being encodable via the polarity of the magnets or via a sequence of polarity changes.